More Buyers Eye Unlisted Homes as Options

More Buyers Eye Unlisted Homes as Options

Daily Real Estate News |
Monday, April 30, 2012

As housing inventories shrink, more buyers are reportedly finding their perfect home in properties that haven’t even been listed on the market yet.

“Such back-pocket deals used to involve mostly luxury homes where buyers and sellers wanted to keep the sale hush-hush,” The Star Tribune reports. “But lower-priced houses are becoming a bigger part of the mix because even those are in short supply.”

Real estate professionals are helping these buyers sniff out these unlisted homes by working their network to identify sellers who would like to sell but are unsure if the market will give them enough on a sale. Agents are finding these sellers through referrals and also by home owners who once listed their homes for sale but removed their homes from the MLS after they lingered on the market. Agents are also finding home owners who turned their homes into rentals as a good source for options too.

“There is a shadow market out there with a lot of people who want to sell,” Joe Grunnet, a broker in Minneapolis, told The Star Tribune. “[Home owners] just don’t know they can sell in this market. They still think the world is coming to an end.”